I am a current-affairs columnist and film critic for The New York Post, for which I have covered everything from political conventions to film festivals. I have also contributed reviews and essays to The Wall Street Journal. Follow me on Twitter: @rkylesmith.

Is Steve Jobs A Creative Genius, Or A Tyrant?

As the Steve Jobs era ends, it turns out that the famous Apple “1984” ad was more prescient than anyone suspected at the time. Except Steve Jobs wasn’t the woman throwing the hammer. He was Big Brother — a high-tech giant revered by slackjawed multitudes from his domineering position on every video screen. And like Big Brother he was a spooky, weird control freak who cultivated not so much fans as thought-slaves.

Big Brothers love to unify us around their selves and their image. They love to make it look as though they, alone, are responsible for all good things. (Daimler makes some nifty products too — quick, picture its CEO. But you don’t have an image of Jurgen Klummsdorf or Hans Sitzkrieg in your mind, do you? You don’t even know the guy’s name.) No, Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPod. And what is the iPhone except an iPod Touch that’s been wired up? What’s an iPad but a really big iPhone?

As with all tyrants, Jobs made the absurd seem routine. A few months ago I walked by my local Apple store — a gleaming transparent palace that looks like a drop of sweat from the gods frozen into a perfect ice cube as it fell to earth — and encountered a long line of what (in an only slightly different context) George Harrison termed the “Apple Scruffs.” The ragged fanboys camped outside the headquarters of the Beatles’ Apple Corps record label were now the wired-up, tech-drunk, expensively bespectacled masses of the strenuously clued-in. The iPad 2, was about to be released.

But not that day.

The new gizmo wasn’t to be sold until the following day, yet the conformist crew was lining up nearly 24 hours in advance, with their folding chairs and their coolers, in order to have the privilege of throwing away a day’s wages plus the cost of a device on something (if they were this devoted) they already possessed, albeit in a version a micron or two thicker and a supermodel’s eyelash heavier. Also, the iPad 2 has cameras for video chatting – much like the cameras on the iPhones every Apple Scruff already possessed (and every minimally-improved version of which they had likewise queued for).

Across the street, where Best Buy would be selling exactly the same item at exactly the same price at exactly the same time, there was no cult, no fever, hence no line (and no wasted productivity). That’s right: Fanatics would rather waste 24 hours advertising their zeal at an Apple store than simply walk into a Best Buy. Five hundred years ago, the Apple Scruffs would have been mortifying their flesh as a Jobs-like cleric urged them on.

In the 1984 commercial, Big Brother speaks of “a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.” Can there be a better description of your local Apple store, with its fresh-faced armies of uniformed nerdbots kindly doling out status-defining electronic accessories to slavering coolhunters, than “a garden of pure ideology”? At the stores, the Cult of Jobs commands “Full loyalty, no negativity,” said the headline of a recent Wall Street Journal story that also revealed that (as instructed in a hefty manual approximating the bulk of “The Marx-Engels Reader”) that the maximum leader requires “intensive control of how employees interact with customers, scripted training for on-site tech support and consideration of every store detail down to the pre-loaded photos and music on demo devices.”

Apple store workers are paid about the same as any retail sales clerks — nine to 15 bucks an hour — so why is Apple able to attract such a savvy work crew, the kind who couldn’t even imagine themselves scanning cappuccino makers at Bed, Bath and Beyond? Because the kids are under the impression that making a good showing at an Apple store could lead to a job with corporate in Cupertino. This seems about as likely as the guy who sells pennants outside Yankee Stadium being tapped on the shoulder by Joe Girardi: “Grab a bat, you’re pinch-hitting for Jeter.”

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The 1984 commercial was filmed broadcasted in 1983 targeting IBM, at that point Microsoft’s DOS was a baby and still an insignificant force in the world of IBM computing. It was not until later 1984 that it became dominant in the IBM PC market, but that was still an insignificant chunk of IBM’s market.

IBM’s world was a corporate focused one, and that was the reason Apple targeted them, their youth and then liberal and hippie mindset stood as a complete opposite to IBM’s mindset. Apple saw IBM as a cold, controlling, entity, that if allowed to keep growing may turn the world into “1984″. It is ironic, though, that it was Microsoft that killed that growth, though.

Anyways, on the monopoly thing: IBM PCs had no monopoly at the time, IBM’s Personal computers were “new” and had more competition then than they do today. Atari (back then they did more than just games and consoles) and Commodore 64 computers were among the many viable alternatives.

The only point where a monopoly came into question was in the late 90s after the competition was reduced to Windows and Macs with a HUGE advantage on the Windows camp and then MS decided to use said monopoly to force their internet “standards”.

SO… point: There is no way to tie up the 1984 commercial as an attack on Bill Gates. All apple accused Microsoft back then was of having no taste.

The ultimate foil to Apple was not really IBM, which was one of many companies making PCs, but Microsoft, because it made the the language they all spoke. In any case, the Gates detail is not substantive to the point being made. If I removed the ten words, “may have been the satiric target of the 1984 commercial” and instead described Gates as “Jobs’ longtime foil,” my argument would be unchanged. Some of you sound like the kinds of fellows who go on message boards to vent about how the movie was no good because the hero’s watch was on his left wrist in one shot and on his right wrist in the next.

You keep digging deeper and deeper: in 1984 Bill Gates and Microsoft were ALLIES of Apple – Bill Gates appeared on stage in person with Jobs during the introductory presentation of the Macintosh. It is a simple fact that the entire point of the famous “1984″ ad was IBM=Big Brother. To say “The ultimate foil to Apple was not really IBM” is ABSOLUTELY HISTORICALLY FALSE.